Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  Every fair evening, after a dinner which customarily consists of an onion, a bulb of garlic, and a head of cabbage, all raw, he leaves his flat in a tenement on Forty-fifth Street, just east of Ninth Avenue, and walks around for three or four hours, shouting at people and threatening them with the delirium tremens, the electric chair, potter’s field, and the blue and bubbly flames of hell. As a rule, he goes forth alone, carrying a couple of oilcloth banners, a batch of newspaper clippings about women suicides neatly pasted on pieces of cardboard, and a pocketful of tracts of his own composition. He has written and published scores of tracts; among them are ‘Seven Communists the Night Before DEATH,’ ‘A Conversation Between a Whiskey Flask and a Cigarette,’ and ‘The Cry of the Meat-eaters is “MORE HOSPITALS!”’ Hall is especially outraged by drunken women, and he edges up to every one he sees and hands her a suicide clipping. ‘It’s a souvenir of the Great White Way, sister,’ he told one woman not long ago, ‘a souvenir and a warning. Nay, nay! Don’t throw it down. Put it in your purse and read it the first thing in the morning. Are you an actress? I bet you’re an actress! You’re riding on the hell-bound train, sister, right up with the engineer. Next stop, the padded cell! Next stop, the Bellevue morgue!’ He despises the theatre and has an idea that most of the drunken women he encounters are actresses; the very word ‘actress,’ when he says it, sounds sinister.

  Hall has a frantic voice. When lifted, particularly in a dimmed-out street, it is extraordinarily disquieting. ‘I can speak on any old subject, just about, and make my audience uneasy,’ he once said. ‘A street preacher’s job is to frighten people – shake them up, put the everlasting fear of God into them, and I reckon my voice is my best asset.’ He developed a quality of hysteria in it years ago in Alabama by going deep into a cypress swamp for an hour or so a day and screaming warnings of one kind or another at an imaginary crowd. ‘Look out! Look out!’ he would scream. ‘Here comes a mad dog running loose! Fire! Fire! The barn’s on fire!’ ‘After a while,’ he says, ‘I got so good I scared myself.’

  His appearance is also an asset. He is tall and bony, with sunken cheeks, haunted eyes, a pale face, and a grim, cackling laugh. He is a bachelor. He likes to be asked his age. ‘I’m seventy-nine,’ he says. ‘No aches or pains, no pills or powders, no doctors or drugstores.’ His hair is white and unkempt, and he has a mustache and a goatee, both badly trimmed; he brags that he hasn’t put foot in a barber shop in twenty-some-odd years. He owns a set of barber’s tools which he ordered from Sears Roebuck, and once a month he and a colleague, an old colporteur from Staten Island, get together and cut each other’s hair. He disapproves of barber shops because he thinks they charge too much and because of what he calls ‘the shame and the disgrace of the manicure woman.’ ‘I won’t be seen in a place,’ he says, ‘that has a pretty woman a-sitting in there for the pure and simple purpose of holding hands with any man that’ll pay the price. No good can come of that.’

  Hall is fully as opinionated on a number of other subjects. For example, he is opposed to the use of coffins (he calls them ‘boxes’ or ‘bone boxes’), and sometimes he puzzles a street audience by denouncing ‘the funeral-parlor trust.’ He thinks that people should be buried in winding sheets, as in Biblical times. Fifteen years ago he got the directors of the Elmwood Cemetery, in Birmingham, Alabama, in which he owns a plot, to sign a document permitting him, when the time comes, to be put away in this manner. ‘I’m not a reactionary,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t be against the coffin custom if they were made out of old packing cases and sold for two or three dollars. That would be all right. If coffins just have to be used, they should be stacked on top of each other, a whole family in one grave. Think of the saving in space! Otherwise, in a few more generations the U.S.A. will be one vast and widespread cemetery.’ Hall is also opposed to soda fountains. ‘First the sody fountain,’ he says. ‘Then comes the saloon. Ice water, milk shakes, ginger ale, beer, hot toddies, straight whiskey, the D.T.’s – those are the steps the drinker takes.’ He is a confident prohibitionist. He is convinced that, one way or another, liquor will be illegal within five years. He corresponds with other street preachers all over the country, and recently, to one of them, he wrote, ‘My dear brother in Christ: I am so sure of Prohibition I have quit fretting about it. I have a good, bedrock reason that if the Whiskey Trust knew about it they would be quite agitated. This is it. For years upon years every time I brought up the subject of Prohibition on the streets of New York the people would snicker and snort. Well, they do not snicker any more. Nay, nay. Quite the contrary. They look serious, and some nod their heads. Even the liquor-head sots, they know it’s coming. They feel it in their bones. Over a year ago Dr Gallup said that thirty-six per cent of the people were ripe and ready to vote for it. Facts and figures. And the per cent is rising, rising, rising, like water in a tub. Five more years, I estimate, and we’ll put King Whiskey in the tomb, R.I.P. And the first grand rascal that D-double-dares to open up a speak-easy – why, the good Christians will descend on him and pull him apart.’

  Other institutions Hall disapproves of are laundries and cleaning and pressing establishments. ‘This is a democratic country,’ he says, ‘and no able-bodied man should have the right to call on some other man to scrub his duds. If people in general, even the highly educated, even Nicholas Murray Butler, had to bend over a washtub once a week, it would give them some sense of proportion; it would keep them from getting biggity.’ Hall does his own washing and ironing, and now and then he takes a flatiron and puts some crooked creases in his trousers. He is shabbily dressed. He buys his suits in a Ninth Avenue rummage store. He paid $7.15 for his last one, and a hat he has worn for almost three years cost thirty-five cents. ‘It’s still as good as new,’ he says. He wears a clerical collar, a clerical shirt, and a gold cross. The cross was given to him by a group of converted highwaymen, safe-crackers, and cop-killers in Flattop, an Alabama convict camp, where he was once a chaplain. He keeps a celluloid badge with only a red question mark on it pinned to his left lapel. When asked what it signifies, he narrows his eyelids and says, ‘Friend, every step you take, Death walks right in behind you. No matter how fat and sassy you may be, you’re living every second on the lip of the grave. The question is, “Are you ready for the shroud and the box, are you ready for the Judgment Day?”’

  Hall usually begins an evening’s work by delivering brief harangues – he calls them ‘halleluiah hypodermics’ – in the doorways of a dozen or so Eighth Avenue saloons. He never goes inside a saloon and he never tries to take up a collection; he just stands in the doorway and shouts. Bartenders are used to him. They address him as ‘Dad,’ ‘Reverend,’ or ‘Shadrach.’ One evening recently he stopped first at the Dublin Restaurant, a saloon just above Forty-second Street. He stuck his head in, cleared his throat, and cried out, ‘Distilled damnation and liquid death, that’s what you’re a-swilling and a-guzzling!’ Many of the people along the bar abruptly turned around. While they stared, he unrolled one of his oilcloth banners. Lettered on it in red was this message: ‘PUT DOWN THAT GLASS AND GO. THE SALOON IS THE GATE TO HELL. DREADFUL ARE THE MORNINGS OF A DRUNKARD. PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.’ (Hall is a good amateur sign-painter, and he makes his own banners.) Holding up the banner, Hall shouted, ‘Brothers! Sisters! That’s not the brass rail you’re resting your feet upon. Nay, nay! That’s the third rail! Whiskey and beer! Wrack and ruin! Death and destruction! The cup that stings, the frolic, the midnight brawl, the strait jacket! Hark to the destiny of the whiskey drinker: forsaken by his friends, his furniture seized, his wife broken-hearted, his babies starving, his liver a sieve, his mind a tangle, his nerves a snarl, not a shoe to his foot. Don’t you people ever sleep? Go home! Go to bed! Are you ready for the Judgment Day? You may be taken suddenly. On your way home, rooting and tooting, drunk and disorderly, you may be taken! You, sister, a-sitting there in that booth with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of distilled damnation in the other, a sorry sight, are you ready?’ Hall was in
terrupted by one of the bartenders, who walked up to the front end of the bar and said, ‘O.K., Dad, break it up. That’s enough racket for one night.’ ‘Why, howdy-do, young man, howdy-do,’ Hall said. ‘Haven’t seen you in quite some time. Have you been on the day shift? Be sure your sins will find you out. I’ll go, but I’ll be back.’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the bartender sadly, ‘I’m sure you will.’

  Holding his banner aloft, Hall proceeded up the avenue. In an hour and a half, after making stops at O’Donnell’s, Kieran & Dineen’s, Larry’s, the Eagle Bar, Gilhuly’s, Pete Moran’s, the Ranch Bar, Morahan’s, McGreevy’s, Mickey Walker’s, and the Ringside, he reached Fiftieth Street, which is about as far uptown as he ever goes. En route he passed out a couple of dozen tracts. He came across one reeling woman and tried to make her take a suicide clipping, but she flung it down and said, ‘Get out of here, you old wolf. Go to hell, you old wolf.’ ‘You’ll have to excuse me, sister,’ Hall told her. ‘I’m not going your way.’

  On Fiftieth Street, Hall headed east. Reaching the northeast corner of Broadway and Fiftieth, where most nights horse-race gamblers congregate along the curb to argue over the racing charts in the early edition of the Mirror, he got out his second banner and unrolled it. It said, ‘GAMBLERS ARE THIEVES AND WILL STEAL. SATAN AND THE GAMBLER WALK HAND IN HAND. SMOKING WILL KILL YOU. WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?’ Displaying both banners, he stood for about ten minutes in front of the Paddock Bar & Grill, a hangout of racing people, staring upward with a soulful expression on his face, not saying a word. Then, as is his custom, he started south on Broadway, a banner upheld in each hand, walking slowly and preaching, most of the time at the top of his voice.

  To stay in one spot on Broadway and preach requires a Police Department permit; by keeping in motion, Hall gets along without one. He walks close to the building line, so that his banners can be read by the lights in the show windows. Even in the busiest blocks, he is seldom caught in a crowd; flustered by his voice, people give him plenty of room. He rarely plans a street sermon but depends upon whatever comes into his head. Occasionally he sings a snatch of a hymn or quotes a verse of Scripture, usually a chilly one from Job, the Revelation, or the Lamentations. Like Father Divine, he makes up words. Also like Divine, he frequently pairs words of similar meanings – ‘hoot and howl,’ ‘shudder and shake,’ ‘masses and multitudes,’ ‘swill and swig.’ He deeply accents the first syllable in many words; ‘disturbed and perturbed,’ for example, becomes ‘deesturbed and peeturbed.’

  He is profoundly discursive. This particular evening, in the course of one block, the block between Fiftieth and Forty-ninth, he made the following remarks: ‘A lost city, hungry for destruction, aching for destruction, the entire population in a fuss and a fret, a twit and a twitter, a squit and a squat, a hip and a hop, a snig and a snaggle, a spism and a spasm, a sweat and a swivet. Can’t wait for night to fall, can’t wait for day to break. Even the church bells sound jangly in New York City; they ring them too fast. And the women! Into everything! Free livers! They’ve gone hog-proud and hog-wild. Wearing britches, wearing uniforms, straining their joints for generations to come with high-heel shoes. They’re turning into Indians. Their mouths smeared and smiddled and smoodled with paint, and their cheeks, and their fingernails. And what color do they pick? Old Scratch’s favorite. The mark of the beast, that’s what it is. And they’ve taken to painting their toenails! Why don’t they get a bucket of paint and turn it over on themselves, top to bottom, like a whooping red Indian, and be done with it? Save time and trouble. Oh, my! Tell you what I saw last Sunday! I visited St Bartholomew’s, and there was an old sister in the pew in front of me with her hair dyed blue, and I mean blue! Call the doctor!

  ‘My name is Daddy Hall, and I love you one and all. An old-time preacher, believes everything in the Bible, including the crosses on the t’s, the dots on the i’s. I’m just a stranger here; heaven’s my home. Don’t claim to be a highly educated man, but I can still read Latin; used to read Greek. If put to the test, I can recite Shakespeare. No degrees but D.D. – Divine Dynamiter; S.S. – Shining Saint; M.A. – Mightily Altered. If your troubles are more than you can bear, give me a ring – Circle 6–6483, the sanctified telephone number. I’ll preach you a sermon on the telephone. I pray for you, and I warn you, but all you care for is gluttony, whiskey, movie shows, Reno divorces, cocaine dope, silk underwear, birth control, and stocks and bonds. That, and the almighty dollar; you can’t get enough. Like a fine old lady said to me, “The people this day and time, if the government was to let them back a ten-ton truck up to the front door of the U.S. Mint and haul off a bogging-down load from the million-dollar-bill department, that wouldn’t by no means satisfy them.” That it wouldn’t! Nay, nay! They’d be back next morning bright and early a-scratching on the door like a dog, a-begging and a-pleading for just one more load. The root of all evil. And what kind of music do you hear now days? “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” that’s what you hear. They play it in the saloons, and they dance to it! Blasphemous music, that’s what it is, blasphemous and brimstony! It’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. That big, stout, fool-faced man over yonder at the curb is a-laughing at me. He thinks I’m funny. Let him laugh! As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools. He probably thinks he’s highly educated. The big professors these days, the highly educated, they don’t believe in sin. Oh, no! It’s just your glands. Glands, indeed! Glib, glab, gloody-doody! Just wait until those glandy professors hit the fiery pit, the bottomless, shoreless pond of roaring fire; they’ll wish they’d kept off the subject of sin.

  ‘The people have strayed, and God is put out and provoked, and He has plunged us into war as a test and a trial, a punishment. It’s time for the locusts and the plague of boils. Famine! Food rationing! Why, it’s all foretold. “The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst. The young children ask for bread, and no man breaketh it unto them. They that did feed delicately are desolate in the street.” People eat too much, anyway. We need a famine or two. Personally, I’m a dead-set vegetarian. There’s nothing so fine in the eating line as a good green vegetable – root, stalk, and leaf. The pictures stuck up in front of these theatres along here are a scarlet shame and a purple disgrace. Grown women with their stomachs showing. Why, their very navels are showing. It’s a vexation to the men. It puts thoughts of a certain nature in their minds. Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s what it is. “Rock of ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in Thee.” My name is Daddy Hall, and I love you one and all. If suicide is on your mind, give me a ring. I’ll tell you what to do. Write it down – Circle 6–6483. Look at that poor brother. He’s certainly under the influence; he’s trying to walk on both sides of the street at once. I reckon he was bit by the brewer’s dog. He looks like he had quite a tilt and a tussle with the brewer’s big hungry dog. At this hour of the night, all over town, the people are pouring it in – rivers of highballs, rivers of cocktails, whole train-loads of distilled damnation; they’re just about washing their faces in it, the boozy, bedaddled old buzzards.

  ‘A pickpocket I converted here the other day told me they have a school out in Chicago, a pocket-picking school, and the beginning rule they teach is “No stimulants!” Have to keep their heads clear. Why, friends, you set a bucket of beer in front of a pig and he’ll grunt and walk away. Highballs! Cocktails! Winston Churchill! I read in Life where it said he drinks a quart of champagne a day and nobody knows how much Scotch whiskey in between. Thinks nothing of it! Just like a Christian man drinks buttermilk. A pig won’t touch it, nor a pickpocket, but Mr Churchill, he’ll get right down and wallow in it. A fine example for the soldier boys! Oh, yes! Oh, yes! The city of New York is just about ready for a great religious upswelling. It’s a bud, getting bigger by the minute. Pretty soon now it’s going to bust wide open and blossom. People are slapping the dust off their Bibles, and regretting their misdeeds, and getting ready for the wrath to come. Back before Pearl Har
bor there wasn’t much use passing out tracts on the street. People would throw them down and trample on them. Now they fold them up and put them in their pockets. That they do. It’s coming! It’s on the way! My name is Daddy Hall, and I love you one and all …’

  Hall kept this up, even while crossing streets, all the way down to Broadway and Forty-second. There, hoarse but happy, he rolled up his banners and called it a night. ‘I warned them,’ he said to a policeman. ‘I put the fear of God into them. Now I’m going home, and I’m going to eat me a big Bermuda onion and drink me a glass of pure, God-given water. And I’m going to bed. And during the night, if there’s a doomsday rumbling in the earth and a flicker of fire in the sky, I’ll be ready.’

  Hall has a sound reason for believing in the imminence of a religious upswelling in the city. Off and on, ever since he came here, he has been in the habit, in the course of his street sermons, of announcing his telephone number and inviting people in trouble to call him. ‘I’ll comfort you,’ he says. ‘I’ll preach you an old-time sermon on the telephone.’ For seventeen years there was no response. Finally, one morning in December, 1939, a stranger called. He was worried about his daughter. She was sixteen; she had gone out with a sailor without permission, she had drunk some beer, and so on. He asked Hall to pray for her soul. Hall did, then and there. Later in the day the man’s wife called and put the wayward daughter on the telephone. Hall gave her such a rampant description of hell that she began to sob and dropped the receiver. The wife picked it up and said, as well as Hall can remember, ‘Why, Reverend, you made her cry! Why, she’s crying like her little heart will break. Thank you! Oh, thank you so much! I’m so grateful.’ ‘Don’t mention it, sister,’ Hall told her. ‘If you have friends or neighbors with trouble on their mind, tell them to phone me. Pass the word around.’ The woman said she certainly would. Next day Hall got four calls from strangers, all wanting a telephone sermon. The third day, according to his records, he got seven. The fourth day he got sixteen. ‘All of a sudden, among the humble and the heavy-hearted,’ Hall says, ‘the fame of Daddy Hall began to spread like wildfire. One told another. Something like a chain letter. Wheels within wheels.’ One of his converts, a scrubwoman, got so interested that she commenced leaving anonymous notes – ‘There is a message for you at Circle 6-6483’ – on desks in the office building in which she worked at night. She got other scrubwomen to do the same. When the recipient of one of these notes called, Hall would begin, ‘Yes, siree-bob, friend, I do have a message for you. Are you prepared to die? Are you ready for the shroud and the box, are you ready for the Judgment Day?’ Then, if the caller did not snort and hang up, Hall would preach a brief, violent sermon.